Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which can arise or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our cloud hosting service and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the given website and then click on the Delete button.